blog

Feb 21

Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses is Outperforming Traditional Marketing

Social media marketing and other forms of digital advertising are quickly leaving traditional media outlets in the dust💨. Don’t get us wrong; there’s still a great case to be made for using traditional marketing channels like print ads📰, billboards🏬 and especially direct mail✉️, but the advantage of social media marketing is making a stronger case for itself year after year. Plenty of small businesses have moved to nearly all-digital ad and marketing campaigns.

According to estimates from eMarketer, 56% of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) increased their budget for social media marketing for 2018. 33% are spending more on digital display ads, and 32% plan to invest more on SEO tactics. Yet, just 21% were planning on spending more money for print ads and direct mail campaigns. In some countries, like France, overall digital ad spending has outstripped TV spending.

Why? Because social media’s advantages are just too good to pass up. TV, radio and billboard campaigns have high upfront costs💸. You also can’t get concrete data on how many people saw these campaigns, let alone how many acted on them. Digital campaigns, however, store data for every impression📊.

Advantages like these put the power back in small business owners’ hands👐. To help you understand more about why they’re embracing social media marketing, consider the following benefits it provides.

Campaigns You Can Create and Manage Yourself

Buying traditional ad campaigns is still cumbersome, expensive and requires a middleman🙅. As a result, it usually takes weeks or months between submitting the campaign and having it run⌚. If you want your campaign to coincide with a certain seasonal event or branded marketing push, everything has to be planned months in advance.🗓️

For social media marketing, you could literally create a campaign in less than an hour. While it’s always better to plan ahead and coordinate campaigns across channels, you also don’t want to miss opportunities when they arise💡. Sometimes you want to boost your numbers for something happening now — like getting more footfall at an upcoming sales event — and social media advertising can let you do that, any time, day or night.

Managing, changing and optimizing campaigns is incredibly easy✔️. You can operate a digital campaign with far less planning, less labor and less spending over social media than you ever could with traditional ad methods.

Social Media Marketing Creates Data That Tells a Story

Everything you create on social media — or any digital channel for that matter — generates huge troves of data. You can use this data to help you improve your marketing and your business👍. Even better, the data that people already leave all over the web makes it easier to target specific, high-value customer segments.

For instance, say a car wash business ran an ad promoting a special rate for their services on Facebook. They can run the ad for their whole region, targeting any profiles that say they live near “Cityville, NY.” But a high percentage of people who respond happen to be in two main categories: college students younger than 30 and single people over 60.

This data tells the business that their next campaign should target these two groups with their budget. This way they spend less money to earn more customers, creating higher ROI. 🗸

The business also learns that it has two notable categories to focus on when it comes to their general business model. Maybe they could start a “college night” that gets you a discount with a student ID, or a car wash membership with discounts for seniors.🌟

Examples like this illustrate just how powerful digital advertising and social media marketing actually is. Unlike traditional ads, you actually learn more about your customers from each campaign you run. Maybe that’s why 48% of businesses agree that social marketing helps them earn significant ROI with effective campaigns and the great data they earn through them.

Social Media Makes Marketing Affordable for Everyone

Not only is social media easier to use and learn from than traditional marketing, it’s guaranteed to be cheaper, too!💰

With social media, you can make announcements, refine your brand, and develop relationships with your audience, all with just an hour or so of work per week. Whether you do it yourself or have someone do it for you, it takes a lot less planning and overhead compared to traditional marketing tactics. It’s also incredibly cost effective since the posting itself doesn’t cost you a dime!

But even when spending money on social ads, you still get huge price advantages. You can run effective targeted campaigns for just a few bucks a day and get huge returns. Using Facebook ads, a car dealer in the highly competitive Chicago market was able to get 2,212 website visitors at a cost of just $0.98 per click. 23 of those people bought cars, giving them huge returns on their marketing dollars.

Start Upgrading Your Social Media Marketing Strategy With BiQi to Make Your Small Business Feel Buzzworthy🐝

With social, small businesses are empowered to get their messages out there and reach new people without having to compete for ad space on the traditional market. They spend far less money, have much greater control over their campaigns, and learn enough through advertising to get even better month-after-month.👍

Social media marketing also provides tons of other advantages:

Develop a deeper affinity for your brand with social engagement and interactivity

Provide quick and excellent customer support with the use of social platforms

Get better conversions with the popularity of social video

83% of people under 50 have a social media account, the audiences are massive!

If you’re ready to seize the advantage social and digital marketing campaigns can provide, we’re here for you! contact BiQi today to start the conversation!

Meta: See why social media marketing for SMBs has started to blow traditional advertising methods out of the water thanks to great ROI and performance data.